Women Mobilizing Memory by Ayşe Gül Altınay

Author:Ayşe Gül Altınay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC010000, Social Science/Feminism & Feminist Theory, POL052000, Political Science/Women in Politics
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2019-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 13.6 Screen Grabs from randominterference.net, 2012ongoing (https://www.nyu.edu/projects/novak/randominterference/).

The project claims further ground by joining images of the newspaper collection to a headline banner proclaiming that someone “plans to send troops to Sudan” and then to a photograph of a weeping woman, her eyes blinded by tears. The woman, in agony, is pulling down a brightly colored head cloth that someone else’s hand is trying to lift up to expose her face to the camera. Later, a self-portrait of Novak covering her eyes with her hands bursts into its own negative frame, as if reflecting an atomic explosion, or at least how we have come to imagine such an explosion. Looking is pain. Seeing is danger. Being seen seeing is also a crisis. The eyes want something behind which to hide, like the tears of the weeping woman in the previous image. But Novak, unlike that woman, can block her eyes. Her hands are in her own control, and they work like the shutter of her camera.

How did this violation come to be possible? Ought we to be surprised? Do viewers even spend enough time with the photograph to see in it the third, violating, hand?

Even when we succeed in paying attention, do we watch the photographs, to use Ariella Azoulay’s term of art, a moral compass that would allow layers of meaning to resolve, or do we merely look?11 In Photographic Interference, images of destruction were held in the hand and looked at over a period of time. But in Random Interference, no such accumulation of contemplative time prevails. By the rules of the presentation itself, one disaster follows the next and the timing of looking is not in one’s own control. Fathers hold up images of murdered children, ripping the domestic from its phantom shell in a grim mockery of the presumption of civilian safety. A man holds his hands in horror to his mouth. Novak holds hers to her eyes. Beyond the United States, the array of images of violence is also unrelenting: El Heraldo de Mexico, for example, shows a barbaric attack in Iraq. And Novak’s migraines continue, as the web delivers a physical as well as psychical assault. Primary again in this electronic circulation is the notion of interference—here to be parsed as the physical pulses of the internet itself, the digital bare life of 1s and 0s rather than the “content” that the medium conveys. Throughout all of this body of work, from the pile to the towers, there is the suggestion that periodicity—journalism, or vibration, or the creation of a pulse—is the line along which photographic meaning is instilled.

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